]]>An unannounced Apple product has been delayed, according to Bloomberg, which is reporting that production of the long-rumored 12.9-inch iPad is scheduled to start in September.

This news makes it even unlikelier that Apple will introduce its “iPad Pro” at its Apple Watch event in San Francisco next week. The report said that Apple planned to start production this month, but pushed it back because of supply issues with display panels.

The current iPad Air 2 has a 9.7-inch screen and iPad Minis have a 7.9-inch display. Although an iPad with a 12.9-inch screen has never been confirmed by Apple, there’s a lot of evidence that it exists. Questionable schematics for the device leaked in Japan late last year, and references in iOS 8 indicates that Apple has been working on a split-screen mode, which would be perfect for the device’s bigger screen.

If production starts in September, it could be a tight squeeze to get the product on shelves by Christmas. Last year, Apple announced new iPad models in October and shipped them a week later. But missing the holiday season might not matter to Apple, especially if it angles the bigger iPad as a business-oriented tablet, with a possible tie-in to its enterprise partnership with IBM.

]]>Professional investors known as quants use hard facts about companies — share price, EBITDA, and so on — to inform the algorithms that carry out their automated trading strategies. But softer sources of information such as reports and rumors have long proved much harder to quantify.

Now, however, a major change is underway thanks to custom financial applications that treat social media discussions as data, and turn it into hard stats.

“The clear trend we’re seeing is the quantification of qualitative aspects of the world,” Claudio Storelli, who overseas Bloomberg’s app portal, told me last week in New York where he led a presentation on technical analysis applications.

He pointed in particular to Twitter, which throws off millions of data points (“inputs for black box consumption” in Storelli’s words), that can provide big clues about stock movements. Here is a screenshot showing Twitter sentiment about Apple, as parsed by an app called iSense:

The result is that computer-based trading tools are using social media signals not only to react to market events, but to predict them as well.

While Bloomberg has hosted such sentiment analysis tools for some time, Storelli said their use is more prevalent than ever. And this is converging with another trend in big-league investing: applications that let traders who lack a background in math or coding deploy technical analysis or academic theories that have traditionally been the purview of quants.

“Our mission is to eliminate the coding barrier,” he said, saying new applications now allow anyone with a basic knowledge of markets and statistics to apply complex technical theories to real-time events.

One example he cited is an application that lets traders integrate the theories of Tom Demark, who is known for using esoteric mathematical models to predict market timing, into run-of-the-mill financial charts.

Together, the two trends Storelli cited — applications integrating technical analysis and the use of social media sentiment — reflect more widespread access to opposite ends of a spectrum of expertise. On one hand, traders can deploy the knowledge of elite experts while, on the other hand, they can act on the collective hunches of millions of average people on social media.

In practice, of course, these approaches are still far beyond the reach of average investors, in no small part due to Bloomberg’s hefty price tag. But they may also appear to be laying the groundwork for democratizing the tools that supply inside insight into financial markets.

To learn more about how tools powered by big data are changing finance and other industries, join us at Gigaom’s Structure Data event in New York City on March 18.

]]>In a busy year where he retooled his Tesla fleet and launched reusable rockets, Elon Musk also found time to pick a major fight with the defense industry: he sued the Air Force last April, claiming his company SpaceX had been wrongfully shut out from lucrative contracts to launch satellites.

According to Musk, the Air Force had breached procurement policies by giving an exclusive deal to a consortium run by Lockheed Martin and Boeing without giving SpaceX the time to navigate a complex certification process.

The contract in question, which involves sending up 36 rockets to deliver satellites and other payloads, is worth billions of dollars with Musk claiming that SpaceX can do it far cheaper than what the incumbents are bidding. Musk has also made provocative comments about the cozy nature of defense contracting:

“Essentially we’re asking them to award a contract to a company where they are probably not going to get a job, against a company where their friends are. So they’ve got to go against their friends, and their future retirement program. This is a difficult thing to expect,” he told Bloomberg.

Now, however, he appears to have won at least a partial concession. In a Friday news release, SpaceX said it is dropping the lawsuit as a result of the Air Force improving the competitive landscape for the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program.

“The Air Force also has expanded the number of competitive opportunities for launch services under the EELV program while honoring existing contractual obligations,” the release added.

The resolution comes at a time that SpaceX appears to have made major progress in developing reusable rockets and booster stages, which could significantly lower the cost of sending objects and people into space.

]]>Alexis Ohanian, startup investor and co-founder of Reddit, lashed out at U.S. broadband policy on Thursday, calling on the FCC to reclassify internet broadband as “the utility we all know it to be.”

“Somehow America leads the world in tech innovation despite having the worst and slowest internet,” said Ohanian at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit in New York City.

Ohanian aimed special vitriol at Comcast, affecting a mafia-style voice to accuse the cable giant of “legal extortion” for fiddling with Netflix speeds until the video site paid it to restore proper service.

“It’s such a racket,” he said, adding that he worried that the next Netflix is being developed in a dorm room somewhere, but that bigger companies could exploit new internet rules to strangle future competitors in the crib.

Ohanian’s comments come as the FCC heads toward the end game in a process that will create new rules for the internet. The crux of the issue is whether the agency will reimpose rules that force broadband providers to treat all websites alike, or if companies like Comcast can charge sites to reach consumers.

Pressed by Bloomberg‘s Diane Brady over whether he would bet on the FCC actually imposing net neutrality through its so-called “Title II” power, however, Ohanian demurred and only said it would be “an act of deafness” if the agency did not.

His relunctance to offer a prediction is consistent with the predominant view in Washington, where few believe the FCC’s chairman will risk the ire of the powerful telecommunication lobby by imposing Title II.

In a follow-up chat, Ohanian said there is still time to sway momentum in favor of Title II, and added that the support of a big company like Google could change the dialogue. He noted that the vast majority of employees at the company support classifying broadband as a utility, but that Google is now a large company like Amazon, whose interests lie on both sides of many major issues.

]]>Bitcoin won another victory in its battle for legitimacy on Wednesday, as financial information giant Bloomberg announced that it would include news and pricing about the currency on its terminals.

In a blog post, Bloomberg said its subscribers will be able to track chart data from two exchanges, Coinbase and Kraken, and get virtual currency updates from thousands of news and social media outlets.

The company explained that it decided to add the bitcoin information in response to growing interest among its 320,000 clients, and because Bloomberg sees virtual currencies as an innovation and an underdeveloped market.

Bloomberg also acknowledged that the verdict is still out as to whether bitcoin will have a permanent place as a fixture of finance, writing: “Bitcoin may be the biggest technology innovation since the internet or a fad whose crash will be as precipitous as its meteoric rise.”

The move was hailed on social media by bitcoin investors, including Barry Silbert, who is in the process of launching a Bitcoin investment trust:

For Bloomberg, the addition of the bitcoin data comes not long after the company plugged in Twitter tools to track positive and negative sentiment on different companies and market sectors.

(For those of you looking for another quick way to keep up with bitcoin news, be sure to check out my colleague Biz Carson’s “This week in Bitcoin,” which offers a Friday round-up of the biggest stories and pricing moves.)

]]>Financial firms once blocked Twitter to prevent employees leaking sensitive information. It worked, but there was a problem: reporters and companies were using Twitter to reveal important news, leaving traders to rely on second-hand accounts.

“If Carl Icahn tweets about Apple, you can’t wait for some journalist to write it up,” said Brian Rooney, who is Bloomberg’s head of product for news. “As social moved into the financial sphere, it became absolutely clear we had to track it.”

In response, Bloomberg introduced a Twitter compartment that sits alongside the flow of other news and financial data that appear on its famous terminals. The feature, which provides a way for employees to read but not send tweets, appeared last spring, shortly after the SEC announced that public companies like Netflix can use social media platforms to disclose market-moving information.

This month, Bloomberg took the technology a step further by announcing a sentiment analysis tool that not only alerts traders of a spike an activity, but also shows if the news is likely to be bad or good. Here’s a screenshot of the tool in action after a CNBC reporter tweeted Comcast acquiring Time Warner Cable, 2014’s biggest business deal to date:

The chart shows velocity alerts (in purple) that reflect a burst in social media activity for a certain stock, as well as bursts of positive (in green) or negative Twitter sentiment. According to Rooney, velocity and positive news alerts for Time Warner Cable appeared on the Bloomberg screen within 90 seconds of the initial CNBC tweet.

Twitter’s positive bias

To detect the mood about a stock on Twitter, Bloomberg relies on sentiment analysis tools that the company developed in-house. Rooney says that tasks like machine learning, auto-translation and natural language are all core competencies for an information company like Bloomberg, which has 3,000 engineers. Like other analytics companies, Bloomberg pays GNIP and Datasift for access to Twitter’s firehose of information. (To hear other examples of how big data tools are changing markets and industries, come join us at Structure Data in New York City on March 19-20.)

Bloomberg has discovered that news about companies on Twitter is disproportionately positive, according to Rooney. One reason is that language and expressions about “a deal” are generally neutral or favorable.

“We have found that Twitter is biased to the positive, but that can make negative tweets more important,” he said, adding that Bloomberg may tweak its sentiment algorithms to account for the bias.

Overall, Twitter’s impact on the market also reflects how the age of big data is changing the habits of finance professionals.

“The challenge used to be ‘where do I get information?’ Now, it’s about curating and making the information actionable.”

]]>Bloomberg TV launched an app on Apple TV devices Wednesday morning that includes a live feed of the cable networks financial news programming as well as access to on-demand videos. The live feed is available without authentication, something that Bloomberg TV Head of Mobile Oke Okaro attributed to the channel’s agreements with pay TV operators during a recent interview, which differ from those in place for many other news networks.

Bloomberg TV’s relationship with pay TV operators has been a point of contention in the past, with Bloomberg suing Comcast to prevent the operator from placing the channel in the triple digits, away from most other news networks.

However, Okaro argued that the new Apple TV channel is not a way to bypass pay TV operators. Instead, he said, it’s a possibility to get a bigger audience for on-demand programming that has been particularly successful on mobile. “Those things have been paying really good dividends,” he said, adding that Bloomberg has seen triple-digit growth in mobile video year-over-year.

Bloomberg now wants to bring its app to other smart TV platforms, Okaro said: “This is an area that we are very committed to.”

]]>Bloomberg — the media company, that is, not the New York mayor of the same name — has been under fire recently for some of the moves it has made on the editorial side of the business, including the alleged spiking of a story that was critical of China. According to a report in the New York Times, this is just part of a much larger shift in which the news entity is retrenching, and going back to its focus on business-oriented news briefs.

This may or may not be a smart move for Bloomberg, since it is a business aimed primarily at brokers, traders and bankers who use the company’s terminals to get a jump on the market-moving news of the day. But what it arguably shows are the risks of structuring a media entity around a subscription model, where the only thing that matters is selling more subscriptions (i.e, terminals).

Easily digestible facts for traders

In the New York Times story, which appears to be based on multiple interviews with anonymous sources both inside and outside the news company, the authors — including media writer David Carr — describe how the editorial operation is being refocused around the needs of “paying customers”:

“Executives on the business side insist that short bursts of market-moving news, not prize-winning investigative journalism, are what Bloomberg’s paying customers want. Editors are increasingly asked to send only brief, bullet-point news reports to terminals — easily digestible facts for traders and hedge fund managers.”

This de-emphasizing of non-business content and refocusing on short briefs that are of assistance to brokers and traders (including the new First Word service, which consists of short, Twitter-style updates and appears to be very popular with Bloomberg customers) is just one sign of how the company is retrenching around its core user — as is the fact that some news execs are quoted in the NYT piece saying a minority of users even read the longer pieces the service produces. China is arguably another sign, as the NYT story describes in reference to a critical story that Bloomberg ran in 2011:

“Angry Chinese officials told top editors in Hong Kong that Bloomberg’s information distribution license permitted it to publish only financial news in China, not political news, according to employees with knowledge of the discussions. Editors ordered the article in question deleted from the website, even though the site is global and not China-specific, these employees said.”

The terminal business is under pressure

As Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider pointed out on Twitter, there is one fact that helps explain Bloomberg’s dilemma, and that is the part in the Times story where it says: “The total number of terminal subscriptions increased by 23,000 in 2010 and 14,000 in 2011, but only by 1,000 in 2012 and 3,000 so far this year, according to several employees’ estimates.” For a business that makes so much of its money from terminals, that is not a good statistic at all.

The tension in the newsroom over the company’s coverage of China is connected directly to that problem: according to the NYT story, “Bloomberg News’s tough reporting last year about China prompted officials to cancel subscriptions for the lucrative terminals, frustrating the company’s Beijing sales staff.” It seems obvious that senior executives didn’t like that at all.

“To the bankers that run the place, you have a redheaded stepchild that is a rounding error in the scheme of things that is managing to create a lot of trouble… if you have a $9 billion company that is about to be crippled by a news division that loses $100 million a year, shouldn’t you take a breath and think about the implications of what you are doing?”

A paywall model can affect your journalism

I’ve argued before that Bloomberg and Reuters — another business-focused news operation, although one with less of a reliance on physical terminals for revenue — are going through much the same transition that newspapers and other traditional media entities have, but it is taking longer for that disruption to be felt because their businesses have deeper “moats” around them. In other words, their market has higher barriers to entry than a mainstream news operation does, and that has helped protect them for awhile.

But just as newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post are being driven to rely on subscription-powered revenue as their advertising businesses come under pressure, Bloomberg is being forced to consolidate its business around its terminals and the institutions that pay for them. And relying on subscribers — whether they are NYT readers or trading firms — for the majority of your revenue can have an impact on your journalism, as Bloomberg demonstrates.

Advertising-driven businesses have their own problems to face, of course, as Financial Times writer John Gapper noted on Twitter, such as an assumed “dumbing down” of their journalism in order to boost pageviews. But that risk is relatively well known — now we have Bloomberg to thank for reinforcing the risks that exist on the opposite side of the media-funding crisis as well.

]]>In a surprise announcement on Wednesday morning, Reuters announced that it was shutting the doors on its massive and ambitious “Reuters Next” project — a two-year, multimillion-dollar effort that was supposed to reinvent the news service’s web strategy and bring it into the 21st century and beyond. New CEO Andrew Rashbass said in a memo that the project was chronically over budget and nowhere near being ready to launch, so he killed it. But the bigger picture behind his decision is that Reuters is fighting the same kind of battle against the future that newspapers are, only it’s happening in slow motion.

According to a number of insiders at the news service, the fact that Reuters Next was over-budget definitely hurt its chances of survival, considering the Reuters news unit (which is part of Thomson Reuters) lost $59 million in the most recent quarter and the new CEO is presumably looking for things to cut. But the web-facing aspect of Reuters has also been in conflict with the business-to-business side of the service for some time — as former social-media editor Anthony De Rosa mentioned in a tweet — and the decision to kill Reuters Next likely had more to do with that conflict than it did with any financial investment.

Business customers are the most important

Like its competitor Bloomberg, the main business at Reuters — that is, the one that actually makes money — is the part that sells news from the service’s own correspondents and media partners to banks, investment houses and other corporate customers, including other news publishers, content companies and web portals like Yahoo. Both inside and outside the company, the decision to kill the reinvention of the consumer-facing side of Reuters was seen as a clear indication that the service sees its terminal and agency business as the most important thing rather than the internet.

In case the message wasn’t clear enough, Rashbass said that the current version of Reuters’ web operation was just fine for now — despite the fact that staff say it is a ridiculously time-consuming exercise to even insert a hyperlink in a Reuters story online, and the service routinely suffers technical issues that take down its blogs and other content, in some cases for days at a time.

In some ways, this decision makes perfect business sense: the terminal and agency business generates real cash, which Reuters clearly needs, while the web side of the service likely generates very little. So why not cripple it or even kill it outright? This is fundamentally the same choice that newspapers have been going through, and continue to go through — their online versions are making peanuts when it comes to advertising, and print ads are also in decline, so why not just put up a paywall and charge readers? For many, that is the only option they can see to remain in business or return to profitability.

Reuters web becomes a storefront window

The inevitable result of this, however, is a much smaller business — perhaps a profitable one, but smaller and likely less influential as well. Since only a fraction of existing readers of a publication will ever subscribe, relying solely on them means shrinking your reach dramatically. That’s why outlets like the New York Times have a metered wall sprinkled liberally with social-media holes and workarounds: because they want to retain as much of their reach and influence as possible, while still pushing the subscription model.

In a sense, Reuters has made the same decision. Instead of a paywall, it keeps the best version of its news and other content for its paying customers, and leaves the web as a kind of freemium version — a storefront window filled with things like Felix Salmon and Jack Shafer, to try and entice potential customers into paying, and to try and spread the image of Reuters as a place where smart writing appears so as to attract more potential corporate clients.

As with newspapers, however, the problem for Reuters and Bloomberg is that the high-paying customers they rely on for their livelihood are also gradually realizing that much of the information they get from those services is available elsewhere, and if not for free then much more cheaply. Reuters can still charge huge sums for as little as two second’s worth of advance notice when it comes to certain market moving information, but the days when that was the norm are gone forever.

The terminal trader has promised to pay $80,000 for 100 of the Linux-based smartphone-meets-PC devices, assuming of course that they get made. Yes, it could have got the same number for just $78,000 if it had gone for the still-available $780 “perk” level, but the Enterprise 100 Bundle also comes with “access to best-practice workshops and 30 days of online support to help CIOs and IT managers integrate Ubuntu for Android into the workplace.”

For its 80 large, Bloomberg would be buying into a very smart handset that boots into either Ubuntu or Android and sports 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a 4.5-inch “sapphire glass” screen and a potentially viable future computing paradigm. Heck, even the silicon anode lithium-ion battery technology is next-gen.

But again, that’s assuming the Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding campaign meets its ambitious $32 million target. Right now, halfway through Canonical’s drive, it’s just north of $8.5 million:

By my calculations at the time of writing, Canonical now just needs to sell another 49 Enterprise 100 Bundles (out of 50), 44 $10,000 “one of a kind” Edges that come with a seat at the unveiling event (out of 50), 1,600 $1,400 “Double Edge” bundles (out of 2,000), 3,996 Edges at $780 (out of 4,500), 2,986 Edges at $790 (out of 3,000), and around 13,750 Edges at the standard $830 price.

Easy.

No, I don’t think Canonical will make it either, unless it introduces some seriously tempting new perk levels. And even then, we’re talking about a product that will only ship in May next year.

But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see the company succeed. I actually like the smartphone-meets-PC concept, and Ubuntu as a Linux distribution has been heading in this direction for a while. And for the enterprise, it would make total sense to have smartphones that become PCs when you hook them up to monitors and keyboards.

Here’s how Bloomberg’s head of web architecture, Justin Erenkrantz, put it in a statement:

“Bloomberg’s developers are already designing and building software for advanced devices because our clients demand a seamless experience from the desktop to the mobile platform. Ubuntu’s goal to offer a single-device solution for enterprise convergence and mobility is an exciting prospect and one that complements our vision for open development on the mobile platform.”

It’s true that Ubuntu for mobile could survive the collapse of the Edge crowdfunding scheme – this is arguably about making a next-generation concept device rather than launching the concept itself – but its reputation would take a hit nonetheless. Let’s hope more Bloombergs and keen individuals pile in.

UPDATE (5.05am PT): They’re certainly tracking feedback. 15 minutes ago Canonical significantly cut the price of the Ubuntu Edge to $695 — yes, all the individual-unit perk tiers that were still available earlier on Thursday have been scrapped. The enterprise bundle also now comes with 115 units, rather than 100. This was all apparently made possible by Canonical’s component suppliers working to stimulate demand for the Edge.

Canonical said there will be no more price cuts, and those who have already pledged for higher-priced tiers will get the difference refunded when the crowdfunding campaign ends (and if it succeeds, obviously — otherwise no-one sees money leave their account at all). They’ll need to sell more units at this price, clearly, but this is it: make-or-break time.